Drastic changes in keyword rankings on a daily basis

[ChaseMG]

Anybody ever seen keyword rankings for a site change drastically from day to day? I've got a client, a local furniture store, whose local keywords (furniture + city) rank consistently well without much change, but when it comes to broader keyword rankings (like "furniture" or "furniture store") in their zip code, they'll go from ranking at the top of Google one day to not being ranked at all the next (at least according to Raven Tools).

My best guess is that it's just a reflection of personalized results from Google, but such a dramatic change day in and day out makes me wonder.

[LindaBuquet]

Hi Marty,

I've seen a few reports like yours recently and was going to share a couple theories.  But then it occurred to me I should check to be sure you are talking about local pack rankings, the pinned results? Because that's what my theories relate to.

The ranking fluctuations you are talking about, is that in pure organic or in the local pack results?

[RyanPurkey]

This behavior can be triggered by several things, for example query deserves freshness showing a blog or news post from the site, localized search playing a factor with out the localized term, personalization like you mention, etc...

The biggest give away is that the ranking + keyword doesn't deliver anywhere near the amount of visits you'd expect for ranking consistently on the broadly seen results.  It's better to think of it not as the rankings changing dramatically day to day--you'd be getting big bursts of traffic when ranking across Google for "furniture" if that were the case--instead someone that was pretty highly personalized via means outside of just there search term, used "furniture" as a search and clicked through to the site.